Liberal Lawyers Try To “Diversify” Profession

Peter Schmidt reports on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog today that advocates of racial diversity in the legal profession are struggling to reshape the profession.

The liberal-leaning American Constitution Society had assembled the panel of advocates at the National Press Club in hopes of finding ways to get law schools, law students, and the companies that employ lawyers to work together to help more black and Hispanic people succeed in the legal profession.

But one panel member, John Nussbaumer, associate dean of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, had bad news about law schools’ ability to contribute to the effort. He said that any pressure on law schools to diversify is being counterbalanced by pressures on such schools to take in students with high Law School Admission Test scores, to elevate their rankings in publications such as U.S. News & World Report.

According to Mr. Nussbaumer, 63% of black applicants to law schools are rejected by every school to which they apply, compared to a 35% rejection rate for white applicants.

Panel members, according to Mr. Schmidt, “were much more optimistic in discussing their efforts to promote diversity in law firms.”

Andrew Bruck, a Stanford University law student who is co-president of Building a Better Legal Profession, said his organization — a fledging group of law students devoted to improving working conditions in their field — appears to be making waves by compiling rankings of law firms based on the number of minority and female lawyers they employ and elevate to partner. He said he had heard many students say they had chosen not to work at law firms with poor records in promoting diversity. His group plans in January to distribute its rankings to Fortune 500 companies, in hopes that those companies will put pressure to diversify on the law firms they hire.

A staff attorney for General Motors said his company was already pressuring law firms it works with to match the “diversity” of General Motors’ own legal staff, “which is 20 percent minority and 33 percent female, and has included language in its contracts with the firms that calls for them to be financially penalized for not having such diversity in their ranks.”

At least General Motors is not demanding a quota (although it’s not clear to me how a quota would be different from what it is demanding).

It’s not clear from the report whether the panel discussed any conflict between firms deciding to hire and promote more minorities and women and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination.

Perhaps some enterprising students of a non-discriminatory persuasion should band together to rank law firms on their propensity to discriminate, and refuse to work for those that are flagrant discriminators.

Say What?